Youth Help Transform Vacant 53206 Lot into Community Garden
Children working with We Got This Milwaukee did 7,000 hours of service in 2025.
Meg Bruzan (from left), Nariah Eubanks and Denzil Brinson meet at the original We Got This Milwaukee community garden between North 9th and West Ring streets before walking over to the new garden. (Photo by Chesnie Wardell)
A vacant lot between West Concordia Avenue and North 12th Street is being transformed into Coaches Corner Garden. The new community garden is a space that has local teens eager to give back to the neighborhood when it opens in early June, organizers of We Got This Milwaukee say.
We Got This Milwaukee works with youths ages 10 to 18 to maintain 15 formerly vacant lots in the 53206 ZIP code by planting produce and flowers to give away to residents for free, while cleaning up the neighborhood. The work helps build leadership skills through paid opportunities.
“53206 has over 800 vacant lots with liabilities or assets, but we want to create more assets,” said Meg Bruzan, board member of We Got This Milwaukee.
Developing Coaches Corner Garden
The idea of developing a new garden came when violence broke out in the neighborhood a few months ago involving a teen.
Eventually, participants agreed to move forward with the garden in hopes of inspiring others to get involved and create positive change.
“We realized that if we’re scared then it’s going to show that everybody else is scared too,” Eubanks said.
Organizers chose the vacant corner lot for the garden because of its access to water and it being in a high-traffic area.
“There’s a corner store right next to it and we think it would be nice for people to have more access to food that they can grab and go along the way,” Bruzan said.
Bringing the garden to life
Children from We Got This Milwaukee work together to water plants. (Photo provided by Meg Bruzan)
According to Bruzan, the garden may have six rows of garden beds with benches placed under the trees.
“We don’t have an official layout yet,” she said.
Youths will put the garden boxes together then place them where they need to go.
Brinson said he’s eager to contribute to Coaches Corner Garden by helping build the garden boxes and adding soil, since he missed the chance to help develop the neighborhood’s other gardens.
“It’s beautiful to see a garden like this about to flourish in our neighborhood,” Brinson said.
He initially didn’t like to plant, but after being invited by a friend to participate in the organization, he said he knew that We Got This Milwaukee was the place for him.
Eubanks spent her childhood helping with her grandmother’s garden and watering house plants.
She said the initiative expanded her knowledge of gardening and she enjoys learning the origins of each fruit and vegetable she plants.
Denzil Brinson (front) helps Meg Bruzan remove a tree branch from Coaches Corner Garden between West Concordia Avenue and North 12th Street. (Photo by Chesnie Wardell)
The work behind the growth
Eubanks hopes that the new garden will engage more youths who want to give back to the community.
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“Even though our numbers are growing, we want more people to be involved in it,” Bruzan said.
The youths get $20 and student leaders receive $40 for working on a Saturday.
Brinson said the effort they put into each garden is worth it because residents stop by often while he’s gardening and give him recognition.
“The adults definitely give us our thank yous out here,” he said.
Though Coaches Corner Garden is still in development, Eubanks wants residents to know it is a symbol of change and unity that is coming into the 53206 neighborhood.
“The adults around here see us out and tell us that we’re doing good,” she said. “There’s other things to do other than violence and what you see on television.”
Getting involved
If you or a child is interested in being a part of We Got This Milwaukee, click here.
If you are interested in donating items to contribute to the neighborhood’s garden, here’s a wishlist.
Monetary donations are also accepted, which will always go right to the children.
This article first appeared on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
I imagine this will be largely seen as a very nice, one day story. There is another way of looking at it, which is to see this garden – and the roles that these young people are playing – as a replicable model for community building in neighborhoods across the city. I can also serve as the “anchor” for building a network of groups doing different things, whose collective outcome will be healthy, peaceful and hopeful communities.
For example, not one that would immediately come to mind, linking these young people to the running group FEAR (Forget Everything and Run) seems like an almost perfect fit for engaging young people in a range of community building activities, all of which, starting with the garden, can serve as models for adults. And just from reading Urban Milwaukee, I know that there are lots of other potential partners, and that younger people have not (yet) been caught in the negative norm of zero-sum thinking and the mistrust that it breeds.
Once again, more than a nice one-day story. A model for producing hope and a belief in a better future.